Putting TRAC to Work
Legal and Scholarly
Law & Social Inquiry
April 24, 2026
The Justice Gap for Unaccompanied Children in US Immigration Court: Rurality, Resources, and Client Characteristics as Determinants of Access to Counsel By Chiara Galli, University of Chicago and Tatiana Padilla, University of Minnesota
	This article examines the determinants of access to counsel among unaccompanied minors using an administrative dataset from the EOIR with information on 2.5 million cases of immigrants in removal proceedings in US immigration court between 2009 and 2023 (through March), including demographics (age, gender, birth date, language, nationality), date of entrance, number and location of hearings, place of residence, detention status, representation, and case outcomes. We obtained these data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) in our capacity as TRAC Fellows. Within this larger dataset, using a strategy described in separate writing (see Galli and Padilla 2025b), we identified 482,803 cases of unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings in US immigration court that were initiated between January 1, 2009, and March 31, 2023, for children who reside in one of the fifty US states......[Citing TRAC data and research]. External Link
	Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University Copyright 2026